Contributor(s): Samira Ben Omar, Dr Atiya Kamal, Caroline MacDonald, Pasha Shah | The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed both how essential and how fractured Britain’s systems of social care and community health are and the racial and economic divides that determine who is able to access them. It has also, paradoxically shown some ways forward for community engagement as local authorities, the NHS and community groups have built new caring relationships that have saved lives and generated mutual support. This event brings together a diverse range of speakers involved in these policies and local initiatives to move beyond recovery and renewal from COVID-19 and question what equitable social infrastructures might look like in a post-covid world.

The event also marks the launch of the LSE Covid and Care Research Group's second report, based on deep ethnographic and qualitative research across the UK. It hopes to set an agenda for investment, research and policy for both central government and local authorities.

Meet our speakers and chair

Samira Ben Omar (@benomsam) is Assistant Director of Equalities for the North West London Collaboration of CCGs and co-founder of the Community Voices movement for change.

Atiya Kamal (@Atiya_K) is a Senior Lecturer in Health Psychology at Birmingham City University.

Caroline MacDonald is Assistant Director of People, Places and Communities, at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Pasha Shah is Head of Community Engagement at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Laura Bear (@BearLauraLSE) is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, and a participant in the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours, the ethnicity subgroup of Sage and Independent Sage. She leads the LSE Covid and Care research group.

More about this event

The Covid and Care Research Group, hosted by LSE's Anthropology Department, are building a conversation between policy makers and the UK population over issues of disadvantage and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

You can view the full LSE Covid and Care Research Group's second report, based on deep ethnographic and qualitative research across the UK here: Social Infrastructures for the Post-COVID recovery in the UK.

This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Featured image (used in source code with watermark added): Photo by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Unsplash.